Who will pay - this is the question...

Posted Jan 27, 2011 0:01 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Who will pay - this is the question... by bojan
Parent article: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

> Useful for what?

Routing of packets from hosts.

You mean: DJB plan will magically induce ISPs to throw money for no apperent reason? Hard to believe...

Bottom line: lots of people have to do unnecessary work for no benefit at all. They are already on the net. Why do they have to connect again? Yeah, it's that simple.

Bottom line: there were more CompuServer users 20 years ago then Internet users back then. They all are gone today. 20 years down the road IPv4 user will be similarly extinct. Switch will happen in the same fashion: people will get "poor alternative" because they can not afford "good one" and eventually the "good alternative" will be useless. Prioces for IPv4 will start raising in the coming years, so there are no need to worry: people will upgrade. They are not stupid. But before that happens price of IPv4 address should become high enough to make these 2x hardware prices cheap by comparison. It didn't happen yet: "white IP" is sold for $2-$10 per month today. It's not nearly high enough to induce change. But times are changing.

Who will pay - this is the question...

Posted Jan 27, 2011 2:35 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

> 20 years down the road IPv4 user will be similarly extinct.

That I can believe. The transition plan to it is still shit.

Well, sure.

Posted Jan 27, 2011 9:05 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> 20 years down the road IPv4 user will be similarly extinct.

That I can believe. The transition plan to it is still shit.

Well, sure. I mean: people spent lots of reasources trying to invent some "perfect" transition plan (DJB's way is only one alternative - and it's just as stupid as all other ones), but in the end there are only two ways:
1. Market way: IPv4-baset Internet will become more and more plainful in the future and eventually Ipv6 will win because it'll be just better.
2. Government-mandated way: IPv6 is madated in some large regions of world and then everyone else follow.
Looks like we'll go a market way. Well... may be not the best way but it'll work.

But for the market way to work IPv4 needs to be significantly more painful then it's now. Prices for "white IP" should be around $100/month at least, not $2-$10 like they are now. I'm not sure we'll reach this stage any time soon. More likely some ecosystem will adopt IPv6 first and the snowball will go from there. Will this be an LTE or something else? We'll see.